A Poetic Inquiry into Journalists’ Experiences of Covering the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse

The second speaker at this IAMCR 2024 session is Lisa Waller, whose focus is on how Australian journalists have been converging institutionalised child sexual abuse in regional Australia, following a Royal Commission into such abuses. This takes the form of a poetic inquiry, which builds on transdisciplinary collaboration between journalism research and creative practice and enables a focus on the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.

The work builds on 16 interviews with well-established and emerging journalists who covered the victim-survivor testimony of individuals in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat; it then collaborated with a number of academic poets who worked with excerpts from these interviews to create documentary poetry that faithfully tracks the narrative arc of the interviews.

This seeks to capture the emotional underside of news and incite the reader’s responsive engagement so that it can be used as an analytic tool, rather than merely as a published output. (Lisa is now playing some of these poems, some read by the journalists involved – they distil key aspects from the interviews into a poem, highlighting the essence of the journalist’s experience.)

Every journalist interviewed talked in colours, interestingly; this relates perhaps to the coloured ribbons tied to school fences to remember the hidden horrors of institutionalised child abuse.